DamnPhotoArtist-Commune

Perfect On The Outside

8/26/2020

I was reminded recently of something I did years and years ago which at the time I thought was wonderful, but which was actually pretty crappy and juvenile. Of course, at the time I was pretty much a juvenile, and pretty much crappy in a juvenile way besides. If I look back too closely I see a whole bunch of stuff that falls into that category; not necessarily juvenile because at a certain point one no longer carries an age which affords that excuse, but certainly crappy. Fortunately, I don’t look back that much.

Once there was a story of a guy who was given the opportunity to relive his youth and fix his mistakes. Having done so, he returned to the present to discover he was a shadow of whom he once was. There had been no impulsive risks or selfish dreams, no mistakes, which had to be overcome, His life had been an exercise in prescribed, established procedure. He never learned to draw a line from which, after forgiving himself and everyone around him for everything that happened prior, he could move forward. His purpose was past-procedural, and he had no future.

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Curtis Hendricks

All my life I have had to learn to do things differently. To see the world differently.

Art attracted me from the beginning. Almost every home in the tiny farming village where I grew up had DaVinci’s ‘Last Supper’ on the wall. I would come across modern abstract art in magazines and be absolutely fascinated by the colors and techniques.

But there were no artists in my village. No one understood what modern art was. Or why it was. But there was an appreciation for photography.

I began shooting with a 1960 model Agfa rangefinder fixed-lens 35mm camera and learned to use darkroom techniques to finish my work. Graduating to a single lens reflex camera I worked primarily with Kodachrome. Digital photography opened a new world. The computer became the artboard I never had; the darkroom I could never afford. I discovered there would never be a camera or a lens that could capture what I saw in my head – that, I had to learn to create on my own.

I use the photograph the same way a painter uses a charcoal sketch – as a starting place. I squeeze out the unseen hiding between the pixels; the angels, the demons of my own imagination.

Light. Color. Darkness. Perspective. Introversion. Mystery. Love.

DamnPhotoArtist

Perfect On The Outside

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Curtis Hendricks

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